My name is Rebecca Alexis Radnowski, my nickname is “Alex,” and I am 28 years old. My father was African-American, and my mother was Iranian. I say “was,” because none of that matters anymore. They went to my funeral long before I went to theirs. Yes, that was cold. No, we don’t discuss it.

My husband is Dr. Gregory Doyle, who needs me to help him get out the door in the morning because he’s so scatterbrained, and will also almost certainly cure cancer. I wish I was kidding. The duality that lives in that man is exhausting. At the same time, it’s kind of awesome that at first when people hear that “Gregory and Alex are coming,” they picture stylish glasses and small dogs. (I love gay people, and in a way, I’m sad I didn’t turn out to be a lesbian. I felt better about it when I realized that I did not have to be a lesbian to empathize and support one. It seems so cliche, but one of my best friends really is a lesbian. My heart bleeds for my gay friends, only because this is a thing that never should have been a thing in the first place.)

As for my actual love life, Gregory and I met at a sci-fi convention and connected because we were both the same level of weird. Neither one of us was dressed up, and neither one of us was carrying anything except an amused-yet-terrified expression. We spent the day together, wandering through layers of humanity unthought of by God, and gave thanks that we each had an ally in the best sense of the word… a hand to grab so the crowd wouldn’t swallow me as much as I wanted to swallow him… whole, completely, without reservation…. and that was ten years ago. We worked so well on the first day that we decided, “why stop now?”

For some people, love creeps up like a plant straining toward the sun. For others, it is a proton rubbing directly against an electron. It was right from the first collision, because we are each stronger when we pool our resources than trying to go it alone. I thought when I got married that I would have to give away my strength. I didn’t realize that marriage wasn’t supposed to *take away* anything. That I was missing out on the gift. I had to realize that I wasn’t longing to be owned. I was longing for a companion.

Gregory swept me off my feet with his mix of oddity and charm. For instance, there’s the name thing. Don’t call him Greg. He won’t tell you he doesn’t like it, he’ll just save it up after you leave and yell at me inappropriately. I don’t mean that he’s mad at me personally. He’s just yelling in my direction, which is understandable and also annoying. Sometimes I want to smother my husband with a pillow in his sleep to collect the insurance money. I wonder every day about my skill level and whether I’m good enough to get away with it. Because the only way you really know that you love someone is that these fantasies are what give you the strength to work on your relationship for another day. I keep telling myself that every time I mentally cut off his penis and throw it in the trash can when he forgets to set the coffee pot to go off at 5 AM. Hell hath no fury like a woman forced to walk to the kitchen to press the “on” button and wait for sustenance. Dear me. “This is coffee, not NAM. There are rules.”

At the same time that Gregory is snippy about his name, he is also one of the most loving men I’ve ever seen. If pictures are worth a thousand words, then video is worth millions. His brother-in-law died in a car accident a few months ago, leaving his sister stranded a week before Lamaze. Of course they were both overwhelmed in their grief, but there were also logical considerations. She couldn’t just not go because her partner was dead. I watched my husband stand up. His eyes flashed, and he became a co-parent in an instant. Gregory and Leila (his sister) named the baby “Kermit,” because neither of them were religious and the only thing that consistently brought them to their knees spiritually was the Sesame Street News reporter singing The Rainbow Connection.

Leila and I have come a long way over time. I really had to sit with how I felt about her, because even though their relationship was not and could not ever be sexual, I still felt threatened. I did not necessarily want to get pregnant as well, but I knew that I was losing my husband’s time and I felt sad about it. I was trapped between knowing he couldn’t be there for me right now because Leila was taking up his time out of necessity, not greed… and knowing that just because he was gone out of necessity didn’t mean there wasn’t room for me to have feelings about it. I finally confronted him, and I’ll never forget how he did it, because it was one of the kindest ways I’ve ever seen anyone set a boundary. I hope that when I have to say something this emotionally charged, I can do it with this much grace. He said:

I am so sorry that you need more than I can give right now, but know that you do not have to be jealous. Eventually, there’s going to be a time when you need Leila in the same desperate way, and she and I will come running toward your danger, too.

There it is. Boom. I knew I was being an asshole, and instead of stuffing everything in and taking my complete bullshit, he opened his heart wider and offered me more love, not anger that I “wasn’t cool with everything.” Instead of continuing to need him, I threw myself into things that encouraged my creativity. The aforementioned lesbian friend (nicknamed Daria because she’s not out to anyone) and I became companions. It worked out rather nicely, actually, because I had all the fun of marriage without the pressure to ever have sex. If you don’t have a lesbian friend, get one. They’re so different than my straight girlfriends, because when we get together I can wear whatever I want, drink whatever I want, smoke whatever I want, and there is no snippiness later. It’s as easy as hanging out with dudes, because dudes forget shit and move on. If you do that shit in front of straight women, they’ll remind you of your behavior at least every chance they get for the first ten years, and then annually until you die. Women do not live on bread alone. Gossip just about covers it, though.

Wow, that was snarky. Not all straight women are like that, and sometimes lesbians are worse. I mean, what is more dramatic than the epic bar fight that occurs when two women love the same woman? It is vicious, and there are often scars because there is more emotional attraction to a one night stand than can ever be handled appropriately, because women aren’t typically wired that way in the first place. Lesbian marriage is a poker game of emotion, and you can tell what’s up by how things go down (as it were). With marriage, though, when it’s good… you know. You never want to leave that person’s side, because you can’t live happily ever after without the other half of your stories.

————————————————————

And that is the beginning of my first thriller. Stay tuned.

Me: Are you making room for grief?
Friend: Grief makes its own room, I don’t have to worry about that.

And like that, we’re off!

My brain started putting together correlations like a supercomputer. If there’s anything at Alert Logic that I wished came in a direct-to-brain model it’s the Log Manager, and here’s why.

There’s a search function in our portal that allows you to search by aggregated message type. What if you could do that with your emotions? You could check on a daily basis how many messages you got that contained grief… or joy… or shame… etc, etc, etc. You would get everything in a carefully formatted list.

Actually, I can turn Threat Manager into a thing, as well. What if you had an appliance in your brain that could receive your incoming threats and be able to analyze them according to past threats and tell you if you need to worry about it or not?

My coworkers will read this and fall over laughing. Yes, some of my coworkers read my work, because it’s my personal life. I’m ALLOWED to have it. I don’t talk about work except for things that would never in a million years be construed as negative, because THAT’S HOW MY DAYS ACTUALLY ARE. If you find a company that feeds your need for the creative *and* the structured, you’ll thrive as I have. I love my coworkers to the ends of the earth, and if you don’t have that job, find it. It will make your life so much easier. I often work 10 and 12 hour days just because I want to. Beat that with a stick. I like being here, and my salary zooms into the ridiculous during overtime. It’s a win-win situation for sure.

Back to the topic at hand.

I am fascinated by the idea that grief makes its own room, because in effect, that is exactly what’s happened to me over the last year. As I began getting older and older with all these unresolved issues, grief began whispering that it was important and I ignored it because I thought I had to… and then the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, if you know what I mean.

I became angry about the situation in a whole new way as Dana and I started thinking about having our own children and instead of seeing my situation from my inner child’s point of view, I began to see it from my inner parent’s and the idea that this experience hadn’t been exactly pleasant jumped out at me in the most ugly and violent scene in my mind that I had a panic attack and pretty much fought to keep myself functioning for far longer than I thought was necessary, thank you very much.

I felt the fear that my parents and adult friends must have felt as they watched it happening, and the relief on their faces when she was finally “gone.” Gone is in quotation marks because she was never really gone, just under their noses where she couldn’t *quite* be caught but had more influence than anyone on my life and the directions it might go.

The other part of my grief was acknowledging three things:

1. It wasn’t my fault. It was entirely hers. She made her own decisions for which I cannot be held responsible.
2. Even if she wasn’t in love with me and never meant to cross a line, the things for which she is responsible are not entirely tied to seduction. Some of it happened in less time than it takes to snap your fingers. In less than a second, my brain chemistry changed from sweet, innocent kid to homicidal maniac in my dreams. Her abuser put it there. Her abuser gave me nightmares of decapitation… of adrenaline… of anger so pure that even I couldn’t contain it because there were people out there capable of slicing into someone’s heart without remorse.
3. Once that anger was fully in place, there was no one that was allowed to touch her in my presence. I became a pit bull in the very worst sense of the word… no fucking lipstick required.

So the moment you start thinking that this story is all about revenge and I’m just trying to ruin her, remember that my mission is to destroy abuse itself and to help people recognize when they are going from trusted friend to absolute dumping ground.

Remember that she’s one of the little girls I’m trying to save, too.

Amen.

If there’s anything I’ve learned this week, it’s that you can’t drive out darkness. Even people who walk in the light have spaces where the day falters and the night suddenly begins. We go into the vallies of our own vulnerabilities, which, to me, is taken directly from the 23rd Psalm. If you replace “Yea, though I walk through valley of the shadow of death” with “valley of the shadow of my own iniquities and terrors,” the landscape looks different, doesn’t it? The difference is that most people won’t even go there… and in order to make darkness of service, it’s the first step.

I can use my darkness for anything, because I have spent so much time getting to know it. Not via cultivation. By not stuffing it down. By not pretending that everything is fine until I had no choice.

I know all my dark places. So do you, if you’re even a casual reader. I don’t mind spilling everything here, absolutely everything, because I don’t care who knows what. If everybody knows everything, there’s no way to intimidate or blackmail me. I am what I am, no apologies, no regrets.

Within limits, of course. I do not choose to give away my humanity. But there are people all over the world that harness darkness and make it work for them. Because we’re not allowed to know the names of those sorts of people, at least most of the time, I mean characters that literally have to turn ON their darkness for the greater good. It’s a Dexter-like mentality, but only from the standpoint that even though Dexter is a cold and calculating killer, you can see that his heart is pure. He only wants to rid the world of people it doesn’t need, anyway.

What I need is a way to harness my darkness, as well. I think I’m doing a fine job on this web site, but I also think I would be quite good at interrogation. If you’ve ever been in a room with me, you can probably count on getting up from our conversation and saying, “wow… I shouldn’t have probably told you all that…” I am kind and caring right until you walk into my trap. What’s the best way to keep myself emotionally set apart? Sit in a conversation and only ask you questions about you. People are rarely other-aware enough to realize that you’re doing it- after all, they’re the most interesting thing to them, so why shouldn’t they be the most interesting thing to you?

And at the end of a meal, I will have enough information to piece together your entire life story….

and you just know I’m cute.

That’s not true at all. I am not cute. I have a layer of cute that you will only see until you know me well enough that I feel I can take it off. Getting to know me is a rabbit hole, because I realized that having no preservation for a lot of years made me spill my emotions to everyone. Nothing was interior.

You would think that I haven’t learned anything, that everything is still interior by the way I write, and you would be so wrong about that you’d come back around to RIGHT and still be lost.

For the record, I am not trying to scare anyone- you just learned this about me yesterday. I learned my darkness from years and years of keeping secrets that were way too big for a teenager, and they ate me up until I realized that they were not of me and had been erroneously implanted to begin with. I had to learn that I was not failing at life- I was just woefully underequipped because my development went 13, 14, 25.

Chunks are missing. Some of those emotions will come through if I pick at them, but the effect of having to hold a secret like being confused about whether there was a woman in love with me when I was still a child (I don’t care if she says it’s not true. She’s always said that and emotionally jerked me around when I’ve tried to ask about our past, anyway.) is that some emotions died and didn’t come back. I talked yesterday about my dead spots. There is one in particular that is so dark that I doubt even the NSA could reach it, because that’s how far I have to dig, too.

In that space, there are no limits, and I don’t want them there. That tiny piece of nothing is a ghost pepper… so powerful that a drop is too much and it flavors everything. If I don’t work from my “nothing” space, then my mind will not accept that I am courageous. It is only when I disconnect and then look *back* can I feel courageous.

For some people, this dark space creates certain…. problems. For me, it creates a layer of buffer between me and everyone else, especially when I’m angry. If I don’t turn off and go numb, then I cannot coolly calculate my next move. If I do not coolly calculate my next move, then I will probably go nuclear and have to pick up tiny pieces of emotional shrapnel out of other people’s skin, embedded like an exploded .22 bullet. You don’t die from a .22 bullet unless the shooter is exceptional. What tends to happen is that the bullet comes out of the gun, hits the target, and then the pieces are so lost that you can’t get them back out. I feel bad every time I do it, but I’m starting to feel *less* bad the more I realize that I am entitled to the same emotional space everyone else gets.

Let me explain what that means to me now. It used to mean that no matter what you said to me, I would stuff it and move on… and then, just like out of a fairy tale, a dragon came down and breathed its fire on me, not to destruct, but to construct- everything within me needed to burn, and my smoke jumper got clean margins.

My abuser was a fire sign, so there was no way I could cool down. I had to bring in a bigger and cleaner fire to burn for new growth forest.

I am a Virgo. The only thing to do now is to rest and relax in the ash-enriched earth.

Amen.

After the darkness comes the dawn, always. Yesterday I wrote about feeling so disconnected from my emotions that I felt like I could slice someone’s head off without regret. This morning, I wrote a note to a friend that gave thanks for kissing my broken places and being the cherished and honored friend that the NF description said I’d get. In every way, this is the friendship I’ve waited for all my life and had to, because I could not have seen the pieces on the chessboard that needed to move for me to be capable of it.

My psychosexual dysfunction says that you don’t really know me if you aren’t having sex with me. Therefore, I could not and did not allow myself to really have friends outside of Dana because I was afraid of creating chaos. I did anyway, and as I watched those relationships burn, I realized that I’d made my choice. If opening up to someone triggered a sexual response in me, then I wouldn’t open up to anyone. I’d just compartmentalize friendship so that I wouldn’t allow myself to feel what was missing.

I came into a friendship in this broken place, and because Dana trusts me to know my own darkness, I didn’t feel bad about telling the friend that I didn’t know if I could be friends with a woman that excited me this much, that I couldn’t betray Dana, etc. etc. etc.

She didn’t even blink. Not once. She told me that she wanted to be everything for me that was good and right and pure about friendship, and I fucking lost it. That’s the tape. That’s it.

As a direct consequence of my abuser’s actions, friendship and sex are inextricably interrelated. How did I not have this epiphany before? My first real “my parents didn’t pick you” friendship was broken in exactly that way, so of course at some points in my life ALL OF my friendships were broken in the same way.

Once I was able to figure out where the tape was, I sliced through it. No more. Friendship stands on its own, and the testament to it is that when I offered up a broken place, she kissed it and made it better.

This is my personality without my abuser:

Your Keirsey Temperament Sorter Results indicates that your personality type is that of the Idealists (NF), as a temperament, are passionately concerned with personal growth and development. Idealists strive to discover who they are and how they can become their best possible self — always this quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement drives their imagination. And they want to help others make the journey. Idealists are naturally drawn to working with people, and whether in education or counseling, in social services or personnel work, in journalism or the ministry, they are gifted at helping others find their way in life, often inspiring them to grow as individuals and to fulfill their potentials.

Idealists are sure that friendly cooperation is the best way for people to achieve their goals. Conflict and confrontation upset them because they seem to put up angry barriers between people. Idealists dream of creating harmonious, even caring personal relations, and they have a unique talent for helping people get along with each other and work together for the good of all. Such interpersonal harmony might be a romantic ideal, but then Idealists are incurable romantics who prefer to focus on what might be, rather than what is. The real, practical world is only a starting place for Idealists; they believe that life is filled with possibilities waiting to be realized, rich with meanings calling out to be understood. This idea of a mystical or spiritual dimension to life, the “not visible” or the “not yet” that can only be known through intuition or by a leap of faith, is far more important to Idealists than the world of material things.

Highly ethical in their actions, Idealists hold themselves to a strict standard of personal integrity. They must be true to themselves and to others, and they can be quite hard on themselves when they are dishonest, or when they are false or insincere. More often, however, Idealists are the very soul of kindness. Particularly in their personal relationships, Idealists are without question filled with love and good will. They believe in giving of themselves to help others; they cherish a few warm, sensitive friendships; they strive for a special rapport with their children; and in marriage they wish to find a “soulmate,” someone with whom they can bond emotionally and spiritually, sharing their deepest feelings and their complex inner worlds.

Idealists are relatively rare, making up no more than 15 to 20 percent of the population. But their ability to inspire people with their enthusiasm and their idealism has given them influence far beyond their numbers.

——————————————————

And then the part of her that lives in me tells me that I could just as easily slit one of these precious people’s throats and walk away with no remorse, especially if it was justified and sanctioned by someone else. I love the idea of The Code. I love anything that feeds my dark side because I feel like no one can handle it. No one can go deeper and darker than I can in my group of friends. It is my illness and it is huge. There is not a monster inside me. In a lot of ways, there are pockets of me that are just black holes. No morality. No conscience. No fear. No joy. No anything. Just terrifying and cold silence. I don’t think I’m dangerous. I think it’s lucky that I’m NOT dangerous given everything I’ve been through. If I have an alter ego on television, it’s Quinn from Scandal, and I don’t even blink when I make that comparison. I spent the entirety of Dexter in my head. I went there and I liked what I saw. I am addict. I will do anything to get other people’s dopamine when I’m in that head space, and everything to find my way back to the sweet kid I was…

If you (plural) love me, you won’t read this and freak. You’ll say, “Leslie has an imaginative fantasy life.” That’s probably true, because my blog and my head are my most dangerous weapons. Actually, no, my mind is truly fascinating. I have the capacity to love you until I just can’t anymore. It’s so big that it will swallow you whole and you’ll adore the way I dote and flirt on my friends.

Just don’t stay around to watch my eyes flash, because you will see it and it will scare you into absolute and complete submission.

You know the really fucked up part? It should.

I have proven this weekend that if you try to hurt my family, I will respond in kind. My mother lion is so vicious that I emotionally cut someone to shreds because they DARE speak to Dana that way. I would have died rather than let them win. DIED. Do not come into my house and accept my hospitality and tell me that God didn’t create me and that my wife and I are mistakes. Seems like a reasonable request.

Apparently, I would be surprised.

Don’t ever test me and try to get me off my leash. The genie does not go back to the circle couch on this one.

“This aggression will not stand, man.”

I hit my limit and I exploded. I slayed all my dragons at once, including finally telling someone in an actual place to help me. The meeting was… productive.

She hasn’t done anything illegal, so there’s that. However, eyes are on her that will not go away. Not today, not tomorrow, or ANY of the days of her life. If she ever touches another 14-year-old, even if it’s only her brain, and anyone finds out about it, I am sure that the consequences will be ominously severe. And since I am not threatening her, just showing what will happen if this happens again, I will tell you that in her wildest nightmares she’s never figured out how powerful I am. I had the balls to tell someone that MATTERED- without excusing her behavior. When I tried to protect her, I was called on it and accepted it as fact. I told that I was not protecting her future, just her past, because those are the only memories precious to me.

She will never be able to get away with anything ever again. And watch the speeding, Mario.

Capiche?

I am thinking right now about how happy I am to have found friends, the kind of friends you keep for a lifetime because they know exactly who you are, warts and all, and don’t even blink. The people that can take your dark side because their dark side is either the same shade or similar. The places that we can go in our minds and not be threatened by each others’ thoughts is enormous. With one friend in particular, I have absolutely stood in front of her, or hope I have, and laid myself bare. It has been a hell of a day, and my story is that I slayed another dragon by letting go of the hope that they would change, and at the same time came clean about something I’d been holding in for a while. In both cases, my friend picked me up and hugged me and said it was okay. What is an even bigger miracle is that this happened to me three times today. THREE.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude. Overwhelmed. These past two days have been better than the past two years in terms of the heights and depths I could reach emotionally. I believe that it was my faith that carried me through, because it was faith in the God inside me. I lost my temper, but I did not lose my dignity or humanness. My faith in God allowed my humility to apologize for the things I’d done, and the things I’d left undone. Those words are written on my heart and I say them every week. They are not just words to me, they are a comprehensive response to life.

Grace to the God who strengthens me, because God sure as hell doesn’t need me for strength. I’m 5’4 and 125 lbs. I could bite someone at best.

Amen.

I was so proud of myself. I sang a movement of the Rutter Requiem, and it was extraordinarily well-received. I had a lot of people come up to me afterward and congratulate me on a job well done, and the best part was being able to take it in. To really hear the compliments given and not write them off as, “ohh, you’re just saying that.” It’s usually my normal mode of operation to reject a compliment, but that hasn’t worked my whole life so why not stop it? Why beat myself up while other people are trying to give me love? I think and pray on these things, and with each day, I feel a little bit stronger.

In fact, I would have made it the entire day without crying had it not been for one woman that gutted me like a fish, and thank God she said it as I was walking out so that I could go home and cry instead of what I did yesterday, which was sing at a funeral and cry all the way through it even though I had never met the guy. This woman was trying to give me something precious, and I am sorry that my first reaction was not to take it in the spirit in which it was given.

What she said was so loaded that the thing I’d been trying to ignore all day came screaming out. Tears came to my eyes and I shuddered with grief, because she said, “I really like your style.” I like my style, too, and I know exactly where I got it. Even while I was singing, I knew I sounded just like her. Not in tone, mind you, but in the little flourishes in our musical personalities are quite similar from having spent so many years together in choirs. At first, she was my handbell conductor and sat next to me in adult choir. Then, when we moved to Portland, she was my conductor for a lot of years at her partner’s church. I live and breathe her style because I have been in love with it for longer than I can really think back.

I heard her before I saw her, which totally made me think she was some sort of supergenius… weird only because after I got to know her, I hardly noticed her voice at all. I don’t mean that in a bad way AT ALL. It’s just that our emotional relationship was so tight that I was never really a drooling fangirl, you know? She may have seemed like an idol to me for a little bit, but within a few months we were laughing and joking so much that her status as The Best Singer in the World™ faded into the background. It is always lovely to hear her sing, and I have a couple of mp3s of her somewhere so that I don’t forget… and never want to… but at the same time, her voice wasn’t what drew me in. It was her stories.

One of OUR funniest stories is that when I was a little kid, she said, “Let me explain something to you. I can’t date you because I am on one side of the desk and you are on the other.” At the time she was a middle school teacher, but not one of mine. At another school in the suburbs while I lived close to downtown. We spent years and years being as equal as we could be given the circumstances, and then I got my moment. She told me that she’d met someone, and that this person was 15 years older than her. At the time, she was only like, 28 or something, so I said, “Let me explain something to you…” And the laughter starts. “Susan is on one side of the desk, and you are on the other.” She was snorting she was laughing so hard and she said, “fuck you Leslie Lanagan!” I had scored a point and it was DELCIOUS. PRICELESS. ALl THAT SHIT. It made my cocky teenager’s brain sing. 🙂

After church I went to my friend Aaron’s and helped him move the last of his stuff into his apartment from some storage units. On the way back, I got lost in thought and just kept taking wrong turns on purpose just to turn the day over in my head as I drove and listened to the Weezer station on Pandora. For a few minutes, I let myself feel fucked up that when I sang today, her style came out of my mouth. That she had influenced me to the point that there wasn’t ever a time when she wouldn’t be there with me. I have learned to talk to that part of myself and try to heal it, because especially listening to recordings I get overly emotional- because I don’t want to sound like the best imitation of her. I want to be the best genuine me.

I just have to get back to the elements.

Rutter’s The Lord is My Shepard is playing in the background on repeat since there’s this one phrase that I cannot seem to get right, because my brain doesn’t seem to keep the metronome going. I have a good enough accompanist that he’ll catch me no matter how many entrances I miss, but it is a career limiting move to show up to a solo without knowing how it goes. For the singers in the crowd, it’s the last one- “and thy…” There are several of you nodding. It’s ok. I’ll get it. Eventually. It’s on the and of wtf somewhere.

It’s a movement in the Rutter requiem. No, I didn’t pick it. I really didn’t. Joseph did. He said, “you can sing Pie Jesu if you want since you’ve done it before.” Yeah. I had to go with no on that one. Maybe later. Too soon. And it was ten years ago, capiche? For those of you just joining us, my abuser had me sing Pie Jesu with a community orchestra, and while I was singing, she just stared. Then, she got up in front of the choir and said that it was like watching her little girl grow up. Then, a few years later, her partner said that I read too much into it and it never really meant anything to her… and she could get away with saying it because my abuser wasn’t in the room. My suspicion is that the only reason she said it was to injure me. I certainly left that conversation with my tail between my legs from having my nose pushed in shit.

I have to keep remembering that these scenes in my head are in the past, and I can let go of them now. At the same time, it is the panic of losing those memories that stops me from moving on. In a way, though my blog has taken care of some of that, because they’re on the Internet, saved for posterity. I can go back and read them when I want, and if my computer crashes, I haven’t lost my stories, the things that make me, well, me.

It’s the pictures I’ll lose. It’s the feel of her hand on my freshly buzzed hair. It’s the way the air electrifies for me when she’s in a room. It’s watching her navigate every situation with unfailingly smartass humor. A part of me truly feels like it’s dying… and should. I don’t regret a moment of it, because I’ll never get that time back. To look back in anger is counterproductive.

And yet, sometimes I have to, because if I don’t, the big ball of rage will swallow every good feeling I’ve ever had, including the ones not about her. It clouds everything. Rage and anxiety rule the easiest when I need them the least. I would like to believe that writing it out, piece by piece, allows the ball of rage to live online instead of in my personality.

Leslie,

I’m confused — how is it that you didn’t know there was attraction on her part? Nobody behaves like she did without a romantic element involved…….

You are on the right path. I’m glad you recognize your own value…….

——————————————-

Tony,

I was naive. She told me it wasn’t like that, so I believed her. In fact, she would emotionally shut down every time the subject came up. I never wanted her to be displeased, because then she wouldn’t open up to me. I learned to play the game early, so if she said it wasn’t like that, IT WASN’T.

I am only now picking up the pieces.

Love,
Leslie

I have a really, really rich client that lives in Indiana. By the time I got finished with him, I had reset his password for our web site, walked him through how to use said web site, and sold him on buying season tickets to the Performing Arts Center 20 minutes from his house.

Fuck this has got to stop.

Occasionally I ask people for writing prompts to get my brain working, and Dana gave me this one.

How do you un-write the trauma? What is the first step?

Dear Dana,

If only I could step out of the pictures on our walls and tell you. If only the movies in my mind would play on our TV. I’d give you access to all of it. All the tears, all the screams, all the terror, all the love. Oh, the love.

“Love.”

I can’t say whether she was in love with me. She claims she wasn’t. I can only speak to my own experience, and what that experience tells me is that she was. However, there’s a whole lot that goes into it (as with every story). Love is in quotation marks because I’m not sure it ever really was. There were genuine moments, clearly, but never consistently enough to believe that she wasn’t going to turn around and give me the silent treatment as soon as I wanted to spend time with her. I spent a lot of time playing the game. “How do I have to act to get her to respond to me?” The pattern I learned is that at first, it would be really intense. Everything I needed and everything I wanted emotionally. Then, when she’d had enough togetherness, I dropped off her radar completely. Getting her attention didn’t work. Ignoring her did, though. As I have said many times, the cat wouldn’t move unless the mouse thought he was about to break free. The more I ignored her, the more I could ratchet up her fear that I would walk, and all of the sudden, we were aces again… until the next time she was sufficiently satisfied that I was sufficiently roped in and no more effort was necessary.

I told my therapist today that it was kind of like losing my mother and my child, because for so many years we mothered each other until she took the upper hand permanently and wouldn’t let me reach for it anymore. When I say that I had the upper hand, I meant that I was “free therapy for one older and often not wiser.” I have quoted that before. I’ll quote it again. I feel smart… and used.

When I was a teenager, I felt like I was helping her because she couldn’t help herself. I realize it sounds impossible. If you Google her name and see her title, you will not believe one word of this story… and believe me, there have been plenty that haven’t, especially because of her name and title. Houston was all caterpillar, and Portland was all butterfly.

And here I sit, all these many years later, holding the empty chrysalis knowing that the butterfly just. won’t. fit.

The first step, my darling dangerous Dana, is to be ok with dropping it.

Every writer should have an essay called “The Comfy Chair” when they’re talking about therapy. I started on the couch when I entered the office, and realized that my personality is definitely more of a wingback with pillow to put in my lap in case I need to do something with my hands. I always need to do something with my hands. In fact, it’s probably why I’m a writer. What better way to get past the teachers for not paying attention than to be so quiet I had them completely faked out? Now that the statute of limitations has run out, I will tell you that I never went to a single class in high school. Not one. I had the woman I was in love with in middle school and early high school, and then I had that PLUS a girlfriend my own age. I could sit in the back and write ALL DAY. Knowing what a gerund is? Osmosis.

I’m sitting in the chair turning the pillow over in my hands nervously when she asks me where I want to start. I told her that I wanted to start from the very beginning eventually, but that right now because of this other blogger that is literally psychotic (said that my abuser’s wife set up my abuser and this woman to be raped and killed, for instance), I was in a near-crisis situation because I can’t eat. (I would absolutely link this blog to hers if I did not fear that I would become implicated as well. I’ve met her a few times, and I do not want to dance.) I am not intentionally starving myself, it’s that taking the time out to eat is taking a luxury. I am so scared that I am down to fight or flight and there are no luxuries here. And this is my base self. My inner teenager. I can’t rest until I know that no one is hurting her, or I will go into absolute and complete shock and browbeat myself that I haven’t done enough to save her.

People tell me that it’s wrong, that I shouldn’t do it, etc. I tell them that if I’d figured out how to stop, I would’ve. And as a Christian, there is a large part of me flip-flopping between disowning her and forgiving her seventy times seven. This is the impossible choice. She has already made hers. I have not. Because my reaction is not dependent on hers. I’m not looking at this from the standpoint of what she decides. I’m looking at it from the standpoint of the kind of human being I want to be. My earthly self says to protect everything I have left in complete fight or flight mode because now I have figured it out and she is the enemy. She is the one that got inside my head, not the other way around. My heavenly self says that I am doing what I need to do to be a good person. That despite the level of damage, she’s the mothermentorsisterfriend I got, you know? I should never count her out because I’ll never get another one.

She is not the one I loved to the point of passion. It was much more than that. She was the one I loved to the point that redefined unconditional for me, and I can be proud of that. I didn’t lose the game. I resigned. That thought keeps me remarkably even-keeled until you catch me on a day without myelin. I’ve had a few of those lately, and they usually end up with me sobbing because I just can’t get it right- or can’t feel like I can, anyway, which is probably more universally accurate.

Maybe that is the legacy of abuse… cutting you off from the places in your heart that are capable of receiving love, while entrenching you in the places that give.

My therapy appointment was a mixed bag. On one hand, I absolutely think that she is a wonderful therapist and that I got genuine validation from a professional that my emotions are valid and there is a very good reason I’m feeling as fucked up as I am.

You wanna know just *how* much she understands? She’s in her 60s and wants to refer me to someone younger because she thinks that my trauma is so bad that she will have to retire before I’m well.

So, that was my fucking morning.

I can’t even say anything else than that. I was right, and knowing I’m right alternately breaks my heart and sets me free.

Sometimes I hate the chord that runs between my abuser and me, because it turns me into exactly the kind of person I don’t want to be. There is someone on the Internet so crazy that she’s actually throwing around word salad regarding my abuser and several of her “cohorts.” I don’t know what crazy people call them. I haven’t taken 401.

Anywho, this woman who is a total lunatic is hitting that nerve. The nerve that whispers “it’s your job to protect her, and you’re not doing it.” So what did I do? Like an ASSHOLE I emailed all her friend and asked them to check on her for me. I used to call it “loving her by sneak attack” and then I realized that the information obtained was not actually keeping her safer, it was just driving me bananas.

I didn’t do anything to protect her. I just did something to implicate myself, as if I’m part of this whole thing instead of trying to be the solution. Perception is reality, and I will not come off looking good. I will just come off looking even sadder than I did before.

Once again, SOMETHING THAT COULD HAVE BEEN BROUGHT TO MY ATTENTION YESTERDAY.

I get into the hero mode of “if I could only Y, she would X.” The Y comes before the X because it would never occur to me that she would be the actor. I’m always the actor. I’m always the one who does stuff wrong. By saving herself and only reacting, the game is that she has never done anything wrong. She just reacted, and I took it wrong for 25 years.

My appointment for PTSD is at 9:00 AM. I have no idea what I want to say. Where do I even begin?

Like every lesbian’s story, I suppose.

There was this girl……………………